


brother, bull, and bar

by trykynyx



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:34:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6650503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trykynyx/pseuds/trykynyx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He tries Yosemite, snags a bartending job in a joint as run-down as he feels. No one can see his dragging leg behind the bar and it’s good, for a while. He feels a promising rumble from the Northwest and the single mom who waitresses on school nights smiles at him like he isn’t repulsive. It could’ve been good, and isn’t that a tag line for his life?</p>
            </blockquote>





	brother, bull, and bar

**Author's Note:**

> trigger/content warnings for: ableism, alcohol, smoking, references to war, references to childhood abuse/neglect

Hephaestus had been lying low since ’45. It’s funny—smiting entire cities is probably the most god-like thing he’d done in a long while. (It’s funny, but it’s not, and he throws up for days.)

Hawaii’s nice, and the volcanoes feel familiar, but he’s rubbing up against something that reminds him, ‘You don’t belong here.’ He never sees her, but he feels her displeasure like a hiss in his ear.

He heads back to the continent, and he doesn’t let himself pretend it’s anything other than a slinking retreat. 

He tries Yosemite, snags a bartending job in a joint as run-down as he feels. No one can see his dragging leg behind the bar and it’s good, for a while. He feels a promising rumble from the Northwest and the single mom who waitresses on school nights smiles at him like he isn’t repulsive. It could’ve been good, and isn’t that a tag line for his life?

But then Hermes rolls in on a Wednesday night, while Hephaestus is methodically cleaning tumblers. A wind blows through the bar and the cashier pops open. Hephaestus has the bat in his hand behind the bar.

“Well, if it isn’t my brother from another mother,” Hermes is perched on one of the bar stools with that glint in his eye that broke hearts and emptied purses. “You gonna hit a home run with that, Lame Leg, or you gonna pour me a drink?”

“I’m gonna tell you to get the fuck out of my bar.” Hermes rolls the toothpick in his mouth and rolls his eyes.

“You never were all that much fun, you know. Maybe you could’ve held on to your woman if you’d removed that stick from your ass.” The bat shatters and Hephaestus tries to breathe. He turns his back (even though he shouldn’t, they were all dangerous, but Hermes could slit your throat so smooth and quick, you’d be halfway across town before you noticed you were dead), and carefully puts three shining glasses up on shelf. He flexes all the muscles in his powerful back, and picks up his towel to start working on another. Hermes sniggers from behind him, and there’s the flick and hiss of Zippo, then a long, sucking drag.

“Yeah, yeah. You were always a bull of a man from the waist up. Below the belt, I couldn’t say—“ When Hephaestus whips his head to look at him, snarling, his half-brother wiggles his eyebrows back, all good-natured and teasing. “Simmer down, buddy, I’m sure you do the family proud.”

Hephaestus grits his teeth and slides over a bottom-shelf bottle of whiskey that has been gathering dust for the better part of a month. Generally speaking, his relatives have a pathological need to soliloquize. The sooner this starts, the sooner it’ll be over. Hermes opens the bottle and takes a swig, cigarette held loosely in his other hand, ash slowly fluttering onto the clean wood of the bar-top. He grimaces and looks at Hephaestus accusingly. “Oh, come on now, there’s no need to be rude.”  
He shoves the bottle back across the bar, with an expectant look. See, the pretty ones always think they’ll get their way, and once, on Olympus, they weren’t often wrong. But they’re not on Olympus anymore. Hephaestus picks up the bottle and walks the few steps until he’s right across the bar from Hermes, doing his best to keep his bad leg from dragging, and he puts the bottle back down in front of him.

They look at each other for a while, and cigarette ash collects in a messy little pile by Hermes’ elbow. Finally, Hermes shrugs nonchalantly, and grinds the half-finished cigarette into the bar. “Beggars can’t be choosers, I suppose.”

He braces himself, and takes two pulls from the bottle, one after another. Hephaestus pauses, and then pulls a cracked glass out from under the bar and passes it over. Hermes nudges it aside, and lights another cigarette.

“You know,” he says casually, like they’ve been getting together every week, instead of this being the first time they’ve seen each other since they laid down the transatlantic telegraph cable, “I could’ve sworn you’d be getting rich in Detroit once you got to this side of the Pacific again.”

Hephaestus grunts, leans against the bar to take some of the pressure off his leg.

“Not my scene.” And it would have been, not so long ago, but it was too loud and too busy and just too much, so he’d taken one last ride on the streetcar and left. Maybe if he’d been younger, still full of that desperation to create (born of an internal chasm, because gods are poetic that way), he would’ve stayed. But after the bombs, there’s something hollow about cashing in a paycheck in exchange for the strength of his body, the cleverness of his mind—something too much like looking for validation from parents with no interest in ever truly providing it. Hermes clucks his tongue, takes a long drag.

“What a town, brother, what a goddamn town.” He eyes Hephaestus shoulder, hammer and sickle emblazoned in deep reds and browns. “Then again, I suppose a Red ain’t got much love for a den of capitalistic iniquity like that. Surprised McCarthy hasn’t rooted you all out by now.” Hephaestus spits onto the sawdust-covered floor, lip curled back. “Nice,” Hermes drawls.

“Fuck McCarthy, man. Fuck him.”

“Says the man living in Bumfuck, Wyoming.”

“I could be living in the asscrack of Washington and I’d still say fuck McCarthy.”

“I honestly don’t get it, brother. You used to be so good at picking the winning side,” Hermes says, and it comes out of the side of his mouth in a way that makes Hephaestus’ blood boil because hadn’t they all always sneered at him, hadn’t they always looked down their noses at him. Here in the semi-darkness of the bar, or out in the cool mountain air, or with that waitress with a little grey in her hair and strong arms and kind eyes, he’d grown used to living free of the yoke of shame he’d been born with, and even the hint of a sneer makes him see red.

“That’s because you wouldn’t know loyalty if it had you by the throat,” he snarls, spit flying from his mouth.

Hermes shoots him a sharp look, and it reminds Hephaestus that his half-brother was the god of highwaymen, that he was as likely to slit open a throat as a purse. His eyes were a deep gold color he’d always been partial to, an inside joke about the price he charged poor souls for safe passage to the world beneath the world. 

“No,” he says, and his voice is strangely serious, “I just know the things that deserve loyalty.”

He gestures with a cigarette that may never have burned out (because even though flexing godly muscle is much more difficult than it once was, they are creatures prone to decadence), encapsulating the silent bar, this little town and all its people in a simple dismissive wave. 

“This, brother, all of this and all of them, it’s meaningless. They are ants scuttling at our feet, inconsequential little things of no importance.”

Hephaestus feels himself start to swell, filling with righteous fury, knowing what it means to be deemed unworthy, unnecessary. But Hermes is not done speaking.

“We are what remains, we are what endures.” His eyes do not stray from Hephaestus’ own, and it seems like they are very much alone in the empty bar, in the world. Hephaestus does not feel the bar between them now, does not know anything but his younger brother, so beautiful and beloved, so different from himself.

“What I am loyal to is you, brother,” Hermes says, and his voice is the sound of two snakes whispering a truth you want to believe. “What I am loyal to is our blood, and to the mind that is clever like mine. What I am loyal to is family. We are eternal. Let everything else go to dust and ruin.”

Hephaestus fells something shift, settle, and this is what it feels like to fall into a trap you couldn’t admit you wanted to be caught in. 

“Come on, brother,” Hermes says, voice sweet as honey, and Hephaestus knows the bar is a negotiation table now, knows that he is the mark that lost when the conman walked in the door. “Come and let us do great work again, you and I.”


End file.
